Edinburgh born Simon Thacker is a classical guitar virtuoso and a creative, progressive force in cross-cultural world music; he also leads the internationally acclaimed ensembles Simon Thacker’s Svara-Kanti and Simon Thacker’s Ritmata.

Rakshasa, the 2013 debut from Svara-Kanti, was a pioneering meld of western classical and Indian ragas. The album was covered, reviewed and revered as far afield and through such musically diverse sources as The Hindu (India), All About Jazz (USA), Elsewhere (New Zealand), The Dhaka Daily Star (Bangladesh) and, closer to home, FabricationsHQ.

In 2016 Simon Thacker premiered Songs of the Roma featuring Thacker, cellist Justyna Jablonska and singer/ violinist Masha Natanson for the Made in Scotland showcase at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival; the show was met with critical acclaim and five star reviews.

On 2017’s Karmana Simon Thacker, in duet with Justyna Jablonska, has gone even further – he hasn’t just re-interpreted world music (or more accurately reimagined traditional music forms from India to Scotland and many points of Roma gypsy travels in between), he’s completely reinvented it.

Simon Thacker took extended time out from working on a new Svara-Kanti programme (which will also form a second album) to discuss musical roads travelled so far along with a detailed discourse on the musical (and natural world) influences that inspired and created not just Karmana but a quite remarkable reimagining of one of the great Scottish Gaelic laments.

Ross Muir: Karmana, in collaboration with Justyna Jablonska, is a journey across the musical history of many areas including Spain, the Balkans, India and the Scottish Highlands; it also travels the Romany road.It’s an incredibly layered work, ranging from the unfettered and semi-improvisational to the meticulously structured; there are also moments of haunting or captivating beauty.

Simon Thacker: That’s very nice to hear and I appreciate you saying that.When I did Rakshasa, with Svara-Kanti, half of that was commissioned work and half of it was my own composition, but here I had a totally blank page.I started working on it three years ago with Justyna Jablonska, looking at writing parts for just cello and guitar, because doing the classical thing of just playing everybody else’s music or doing the same stuff as everyone else is just not of interest to me.We’ve both played the classical masterworks – that’s part of our backgrounds – but that’s not enough, not for this journey we’re both on. And that’s not enough for me as a composer, either.I compose for all the groups I work with now, I don’t commission anyone anymore. I’m purely writing, or improvising, as the ideas come to me, but the problem is getting the time to work on them and making them become a reality.

That’s especially true of the time it took for Karmana, which all started with the Karmana Suite.Usually I’ll improvise and come up with enough material for me to say "that’s really good, that will make for a good five minute piece," but with Karmana I very quickly had about thirty minutes of material!I’ve never had that amount of material to work with before, not from the same sound world anyway, even although it might be in completely different keys or using different scales.So that’s why the Karmana Suite became six movements.As you know I've been experimenting with different musicians from around the world – not just Svara-Kanti but with Ritmata, where we have pieces influenced by medieval Spain, East Africa, the Middle East, Native American and Sephardic Judaism...

ST: So, in much the same way as Ritmata, Karmana reflects the journeys of Justyna and I to this point.It’s like snapshots of our development and, with the Indian music and its influences, it just seemed natural for Justyna and me to take that somewhere else and offer something a little different from Svara-Kanti, because the cello has a very earthy sound.Obviously a guitar has a similar register to a cello, whereas an instrument like the violin is much higher; that makes you, as a composer, start to compose as if you have one big instrument with a lot of hands playing it.It’s like a musical octopus where every hand can do something different!Classical performers don’t tend to improvise much but I’ve developed that technique over so many years that Svara-Kanti’s last programme, when we played in Bangladesh for the very first time to sixty thousand people, was one hundred percent improvised.

RM: Wow [laughs]. Has improvisation always been part of your repertoire or skill set?

ST: I’ve always improvised in my spare time – I played jazz at university, I played in rock bands out of high school, so it’s always been part of what I do.But with classical guitar? Not so much, until 2009 when I started to improvise solo classical guitar as an opening foe Ritmata programmes; I improvised for three or four minutes before the whole band came in.So from three or four minutes with Ritmata to a whole Svara-Kanti concert, where nothing was written down whatsoever!But having experimented with Indian music it just seemed the natural next step, asking myself "where else can I go?" I’m not going to stand still because as soon as you know too much about what you’re doing, as soon as you have too much of a grasp, it becomes this thing that you know, and can hold, and that becomes boring for me.

RM: You mentioned starting off with the Karmana Suite. What struck me about the piece – specifically some of the more frenetic parts – was that if you switched from classical guitar and cello to, say, pedal distorted electric and bass guitar, you are not far removed from rock or heavy metal shredding.Similarly transcribing for trumpet and saxophone and it’s heading towards free-form jazz.There’s an incredible range of not just musical influences, but musical genres…

ST: Yeah, it’s a strange one because as you’re composing you’re not conscious of any of these things but for me that’s a sign you are composing from the right place – you are truly composing, you are not putting together a collection of musical clichés.But then it also helps that I’m not part of any movement – I live in the middle of nowhere [laughs] and have lived in the same area all my life, so I’ve never been influenced, or felt the need to be influenced, by any one musician or any one genre; I listened to absolutely everything.​When I was eight or nine I was listening to Megadeth but by the time I was ten I was listening to both AC/DC and pre-war blues.From there I started to trace things back to the earlier, original blues; I was asking myself "where did this come from?" Well, from "Son" House, Charley Patton, Robert Johnson, Blind Lemon Jefferson.And from there I discovered Memphis blues and Howlin’ Wolf and Muddy waters, then Texas blues, and before you know it you’ve arrived at Cream and Led Zeppelin!

Later, I similarly traced the lineage of classical guitar music, which contains a lot of Spanish music; from Spanish classical music you go to its source of folk music and flamenco and from there you find Gypsy music.Then you ask yourself "right, where did Gyspy music originate?" and you discover Rajasthan and Rajasthani music, at which point you start to travel through all the neighbouring territories…So you’re tracing the path like a snowball effect in to the past; you’re gathering momentum, increasing the scale of your work and your influences.I think that’s what I’m doing, taking those processes that have been happening for hundreds if not thousands of years, but not through any conscious thought of "right let’s cliché that!" [laughs]It’s comes more from an understanding of the music that moves you, from part of your very sub-conscious. From all that the right place to compose comes out, as a real and emotional response to whatever it is you are trying to create.

RM: Many music lovers, especially rock fans, tend to think of progressive musicians as those in progressive rock bands. While there are some truly innovative acts out there, exploring and stretching the progressive boundaries, many, ironically, are not progressive but regressive – reinventing the wheel or playing what they or others have previously, albeit with the notes in a different order and the solos in different places [laughter].My point being there are genuinely progressive musicians and composers out there who don’t swim in those particular musical waters; individuals like yourself who think, feel, compose and create in a multi-faceted musical environment.

ST: I think that goes back to what I was saying earlier about living out in the country, not having any one influence and listening to absolutely every kind of music – my parents had a big CD and record collection and I was always buying LPs and tapes, so I was totally into music.And living in the country – my school was a two and half mile cycle ride – meant we weren’t in the community although there was a community. It was like living on an island.Perhaps that self-reliance, as well as being comfortable with my own thoughts and developing my own thoughts – which not everyone can do – had a part to play, from an artistic point of view.

RM: And as regards the guitar?

ST: I started to play guitar at eleven but I only ever went to one lesson at Primary School, in what were called group classes.The music teacher knew a few chords but when he showed them to me, because I’m left-handed, they were the wrong way round! [laughs]. I had the right shape, the right fingering, but the wrong sound came out because the guitar and the strings were upside down! [laughter] So that didn’t go very well as a start to the guitar and I immediately stopped.But, during the holidays between leaving Primary School and going to High School a local plumber, who played in a covers band in a Miners Welfare Club, restrung a guitar for me.

​Shortly after that – and I remember this very clearly to this day – we had the Jimi Hendrix BBC Radio Sessions album playing; it was half-way through disc one and Hoochie Coochie man was on; it was twelfth fret, three strings and I started to play along to the song.It was probably awful though because it was the first time I had ever played guitar in my life – well, second time if you include the upside down teaching [laughs] – and it just went from there.

Half way through the first year of High School I started to take lessons from the music teacher; I also took some private lessons where I could learn more chords and play all sorts of songs from Simon & Garfunkle to AC/DC.Through private lessons I was introduced to two strands of music simultaneously – rock songs and popular songs – but in concert at High School I didn’t play many other peoples’ pieces; I was known as "the guy who plays his own music!" [laughs]

RM: All from an upside down guitar, a later restring and playing along by ear to a blues cover by Jimi Hendrix…

ST: Yes! [laughs]

RM: From those solo beginnings to back to the present day and Karmana and Justyna Jablonska.Karmana is your first collaborative and formal recording but you’ve been playing and performing live with Justyna for around three years now?

ST: Three years, yes. Initially though, we were playing pieces together that, as we very quickly realised, didn’t reflect our musical journeys or us as people.So that became the mission, to better reflect ourselves as people and musicians.Justyna is an amazing cellist; she comes from Łódź, which is one of the most centrally located and biggest cities in Poland but has lived in Edinburgh for quite a few years now.Justyna completed her Bachelor of Music with Honours degree at Edinburgh Napier University, where I taught, then studied at the Swedish National Orchestra Academy.When she came back from Sweden we started working and performing together.

RM: Amazing cellist, as you say, but as Justyna mentions on the liner notes of Karmana she had to challenge herself as a musician and come way out of her comfort zone to visit places she had never been before for your compositions and artistic vision…

ST: If you are part of a specific genre or have a very clear direction – "I’m going to do blues rock" or "I’m going to throw two genres together," even very different ones like funk with some punk influences – you have a handle on where you are going.But if someone faces their weaknesses or the unknown, and just runs full speed into it without giving a shit about the consequences, that can be a scary thing.From that point of view I’m not sure that some of the musicians, across all the bands I’ve worked with, particularly enjoy working with me! [laughs].But, once we have this thing, this creation, and it’s ready to go or being performed, then everyone enjoys it because you are now on this journey together – and you have to stick together to achieve something that’s not been done before or at least not exactly in the same way; Justyna and I have this need to expand beyond what’s expected of us and even beyond our own expectations...

ST: Actually, I’d like to ask you a couple of questions – or rather I have two theories I’d like to put to you…

RM: By all means.

ST: The first one is that the increasing complexity of life, of society and the world in general, actually makes people fearful or wanting more simplicity.I don’t want to sound all conspiracy theorist but it seems to be to the advantage of people in power to make people ever more afraid of that complexity – and rather than harness or embrace complexity it seems they simplify it down to a blunt message and control people through that message.That’s why I think that music, now, is in a very conservative state; I was interested to hear if you would agree with that.

RM: I do. I also agree there is a correlation between the socio-political map of the world and its attempt to control and the sadly successful attempts of the entertainment world to control through a fast-food conveyor belt of manufactured pop, music to watch, flash-bang-wallop movie franchises and celebrity TV.As I’ve said many, many times we are in an era where marketable commodity completely and utterly dominates over musical creativity, certainly in the mainstream pop, Billboard chart and MTV arenas.Sorry, I’m one step away from my soapbox [laughter]. Your second theory?

ST: My second theory is to do with streaming sites and their playlists.A lot of pop people – not necessarily good, artistically, but incredibly successful – are all over those playlists while those who are more talented are never going to get heard.It used to be that those artists would get airplay, reviews, features and adverts in a number of magazines, which builds up the momentum; now they might get themselves a FaceBook ad – and that’s gone in a week!We have a Spotify playlist generation, or more accurately a listener-base, built over the last five years, where I’ve noticed that they have pretty much the same song, played slightly different ways, on their playlists.It’s the same few clichés or the same notes or chords but, as you said earlier, in a different order.One song might have a man singing about one subject, the next song might have a woman singing about a slightly different subject, but in terms of the harmonies, the melodies, the production and the buttons they are pushing to get all those little clichés in, it’s pretty much the same song.

I think a lot of that comes down to these artists, perhaps subconsciously, developing a need to be heard and to be successful through simplicity.It’s natural to want to be heard and be successful but that’s not something I would ever change my music for, although I might be swimming against the tide there [laughs]So there is this equilibrium happening where all where all these people are going in the same direction and playlists are being built around all these clichés and genre specific compilations – Turbo Folk or Lost in the Woods Acoustic; catchy playlist names to satisfy an audience.

RM: That's not so much a theory Simon as an astute observation. We have reached a stage where the streaming powers that be and the mainstream musical media, who have to take an equal, if not bigger, share of the blame, are saying not just "here’s what you should be listening to but here’s what you must listen to."​The other side of Spotify, which we won’t go into or we would be here all day, is the 0.003 pence or cent the musician or songwriter gets per streamed play of something that is their artistic creation.That is such an unregulated injustice that I find myself getting angry just mentioning it – and I’m not a songwriter.

ST: I don’t use Spotify for that very reason. There is one track of mine on there and that’s because they put the Svara-Kanti track Rakshasa on a compilation called The Rough Guide to Psychedelic India! [laughs]

RM: That perfectly sums up your genre specific line about compilations and their catchy names to grab attention.Good that Rakshasa the track got some exposure but Rakshasa the album is not the sort of release that’s going to ever pop up on your average Spotify user’s playlist.That's even more true of Karmana…

ST: I think that’s why Karmana is so unusual in this era of cliché playlisting and non-individuality.You have a lot of information you can access now – you could probably learn to play the guitar on-line to a good level because there are some good lessons out there, but you would have to be pretty intuitive to be able to do it. It is possible, but there would be little individuality, little personality.But Karmana, as you pointed out earlier, is a very layered work; It’s distinctive and embraces the complexity of what we are, who we are and where we are, harnessing all of that towards a positive end.​We’ve talked about the Karmana Suite but we also have a Polish based tune, rewritten to feature Justyna’s cello, a Roma Gypsy song featuring singer and violinist Masha Natanson and a piece written in the Indian tradition featuring tabla player Sarvar Sabri.It’s about creating something out of those meetings – it’s not a fusion, it’s taking Hindustani music and western music and even jazz improvisation and extending the development of those genres, styles and traditions until it’s neither Indian nor western music, it’s something else.

​ Simon Thacker and Justyna Jablonska invite you to dip your toes in the magical Karmana waters, where you will find reimagined cross cultural world music that is truly progressive, impressive and immersive.

ST: On Karmana we also have the Gaelic lament An t-larla Diùrach, The Earl of Jura, reimagined for guitar and cello – having experimented with so many other styles it was interesting to finally approach Scottish music and do something different with it; it works perfectly with the cello and Justyna plays it absolutely beautifully.And then beyond that we have Ruaigidh Dorchadas, The Highland Widow’s Lament; twelve and three quarter minutes of an instrumental narrative depicting the Act of Union and the resolution to do something about it, rebellion, annihilation at the battle of Culloden and then one of the most beautiful songs in the Gaelic tradition, totally transformed and taken somewhere Scottish music had never even imagined itself going before.We have all these Scottish folk musicians out there doing great things but this is completely different from anything that has been done before – twenty five guitars simultaneously, seven cellos simultaneously and one of Scotland’s greatest ever singers, Karine Polwart, who comes from those Scots traditions; she sings it so beautifully.

RM: It’s one of the most creative and extraordinary musical reimagining I’ve ever heard.The first three of four minutes has an almost frenetic jazz-metal energy before we have the musical juxtaposition of Karine’s beautiful singing and the background discordance of guitars and cellos; the continuing anguish of the instrumental narrative, as you described it.It is also, to touch on something I mentioned earlier, a truly progressive piece of music.All of which leads to the question of how you ever conceived of such a piece, such a reimagining?

ST: It’s baffling even to me, Ross! I could talk about that piece for days because there is so much behind it. The title track of Rakshasa was a departure for me but an intentional departure, which goes back to what I was saying before about how if it gets too real or too defined it becomes dangerously complacent.For me, artistically, there’s always got be a danger, or a space between terrorising yourself and the safety of what you know – that’s when the exciting things happen.It should never be total terror, because that becomes chaos, and not total safety, because that’s just boring.

After Rakshasa, which was a massive step forward for me, having never done anything like that before in my life, I was already starting to think "right, how do I take this on? How do I go beyond that?"Rakshasa stands there forever and I’m very proud of it; it has things which are truly unique – I basically invented a Raga for that piece – but I wanted to take what I learned from Rakshasa and go on to something even bigger.And having done the Gaelic piece The Earl of Jura it just seemed the natural next step; I was ready to tackle Scottish music and approach Scottish folk music in a new way – I wanted to take it somewhere else and show where Scottish music could go and what it could become.Also, I totally reject the premise that we’ve done so many things in music there’s not a lot of places left to go. I don’t accept that. We’ve only scratched the surface of what’s possible and I know I’ve only started to scratch the surface of what’s possible for me.

RM: Well I’d like to go on record to say your reimagining of The Highland Widow’s Lament is one hell of a scratch, Simon [laughter]. How did you get Karine involved in the project?

ST: It was always in the back of my mind to have Karine involved in a piece.Karine lives quite near to me and I’ve followed her career for years – I also played with her brother Steven in a duo for many years.At the end of 2013, after Rakshasa, I asked Karine if she would be interested in singing on a piece, although I had no idea what that would be at the time other than a Scottish song and probably a Robert Burns song.So I listened to every Burns song and every version, about fourteen CD’s worth [laughs]; I narrowed it down to about ten choices where the melodies and the words had some relevance to what it was I was trying to do, what I was trying to define.

But I didn’t just want a beautiful song with lovely words – The Highland Widow’s Lament it is a beautiful song, with an incredible melody, but I wanted to have an instrumental narrative that would lead up to the point where the singer would enter and whose story then unfolds.Each verse reflects the shifting inner emotions of the protagonist; at one point the widow is remembering fondly, at another point she is bemoaning the death of her husband and her culture.And, additionally, with the Scottish Independence Referendum of 2014 being such a pivotal point in Scotland’s history it just seemed natural to respond to that – not to make a political point but to add my contribution to post-referendum Scotland; it all just seemed to come together perfectly.

RM: I’m guessing however, by its sheer scope and complexity, it didn’t come together overnight…

ST: I’ll tell you, that piece almost killed me! [laughs]. For six months – not every day, but most days, morning to night – it was "right, what’s happening on track twenty-two of this section… maybe we should move this bit forward a little and shift this bit backwards, or we could play the tremolo effect here at a slightly different speed…"To survive through all that I had to give myself a structured, daily life; I went for a walk every day to a river which is about twenty-five minutes from where I live. It became something like a meditation.I wasn’t sitting at the riverside going "Om" but I would stand, watching the river and noticing movement, the interaction of foreground to background, the flow of the water, the movement of the trees and the grass.I would watch a bird moving in a certain way and at a certain speed, imagining that it had seen something and was moving the way it did because the wind was moving in a certain direction…I was noticing those sorts of things constantly; it was almost like opening up my perception.

RM: That’s exactly what you were doing; you are describing and were experiencing an interconnectedness to all things, which is a Buddhist trait.I also find it interesting that a number of the musicians I gravitate towards, both as individuals and as extremely gifted, or creative, musicians, think, perceive or channel in the same fashion.Without detracting from your incredibly creative compositional skills, I’m willing to bet without that that perception, that openness, you probably don’t create or reimagine material such as The Highland Widow’s Lament in the same way.

ST: Yeah, and the thing about that piece was it was it came together almost like happy coincidences.Actually, it was more like a set of discoveries – if you open yourself to everything and let things take their natural course, then things happen in the right way.There was one day where I was working on a particular piece all the hours and in to the night; I was listening to the second verse and thinking "where the hell did all those birds come from!" [laughs]

As I said before we’re out here in the middle of nowhere and the birds are here constantly; it becomes ambient noise – but I hadn’t noticed they were very close by and, with the window open, they were on the track!They had also come in at absolutely the perfect point; if I had thought "I’m going to put some birds on this piece" I couldn’t have placed it better. It was just perfection.​The next day I went outside and recorded them properly with a field recorder and used that, in the same place, although the birds are backwards, to give a feeling of wrongness, of unsettledness, of evil almost.

RM: Isn't that extraordinary, yet at the same time not so extraordinary, given what we have just talked about as regards openness, connectedness and things happening in the right way at the right time.

ST: That was just one example. Another day I was walking towards the river with my headphones on and as I approached the river and took them off I was aware of a breeze picking up and then hundreds of crows going absolutely mental!It was a total Hitchcock moment, a terrifying noise; an earful of birds going absolutely crazy and then about a minute later a massive thunder crack, which explained why they were doing that.By this point I had been working on the piece for months and months but recording was now only about a week away and I was still looking for an ending – so I was cutting it fine! [laughs]But that sound was it, I thought "that’s what I need! I want that feeling of absolute terror!"

So I went away, came back later with my field recorder, and that’s what you hear at the end of the last verse, a cacophony of crows – well that and a backwards recorded pheasant, who was screaming so loudly, probably looking for a shag [loud laughter], that he woke me up from a sleep!I put him on backwards because what they do is scream, then beat their wings – but by recording it backwards the beating of the wings comes first, then the scream, which is even more terrifying.It was like nature was picking at the rotting corpse of Gaelic culture in that last verse; her husband has been killed, her life as she knew it is over, the Highland way of life has ended.

There’s also a sheep recorded backwards, and a sheep’s "baaa" backwards is a syllable which, as Karine noted, sounded rather ironic after the last verse.So we had all these things on at the end depicting that rotting corpse of culture, but if I was to sit here, within an enclosed space, and try to think of all those things? They would never come to me.But by noticing the flight of a bird, the direction of the wind, looking at the motion of the water, the movement of the trees and grass, you have all these strata and layers of activity – it’s almost a methodology of pondering sub-consciously and then letting it happen, musically.But I don’t really know how it happened! [laughs]

RM: I think we do know how – by letting the natural world, and the backwards recorded sounds of the natural world, make a statement, so you too made a statement, a remarkable, creative and highly individualistic one which we're about to play out with.Simon, thanks for your extended time and long may your creative juices, much like your meditative river, flow.

ST:Thank you so much Ross; it’s been very kind of you to feature me on FabricationsHQ and I greatly appreciate your support of my work. Cheers!